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For
an industry that prides itself on innovation, Silicon Valley loves
to conform. The herd mentality can be seen everywhere, from tech
executives’ collective commitment towearing
wool slippersin public to the spectacle
of Facebook, Google and Twitter sheepishly echoing one another’s
testimony at a series of congressional hearings in October.

In recent months, a
new trend has emerged among the tech elite: publicly bashing the
companies that made them enormously wealthy.

Sean Parker and
Chamath Palihapitiya, both former Facebook executives, made
headlines recently with sharp critiques of their former employers’addictive
qualitiesanddamage
to society. The pair joined a growing chorus ofdisenchanted
techies, including the Facebook engineer who invented the
Like button, the former Google ethicist Tristan Harris, and the
designer who came up with the “pull to refresh” mechanism used by
Twitter.

“I wake up in cold
sweats every so often thinking: what did we bring to the world?”
said Tony Fadell, the founder of Nest and one of the key
architects of the iPod, at aconference
in June. “Did we really bring a nuclear bomb with
information that can – like we see with fake news – blow up
people’s brains and reprogram them?”

Tech’s nascent moment
of reckoning is welcome – if somewhat belated. Victor Frankenstein
recognized that his creation was a “miserable monster” on the very
same “dreary night of November” that he created it. It appears to
have taken a full decade and adifferent
dreary November nightto awaken the new
class of tech agonistes to the horror of their inventions.

The election of
Donald Trump was “a big slap in the face” for people at Facebook,
said Antonio Garcia-Martinez, a former Facebook product manager.
To mostFacebookemployees,
Garcia-Martinez said, “Trump is the incarnation of Satan. The fact
that they helped Satan get elected does dog a lot of people.”

Ev Williams, one of
the co-founders of Twitter, told theNew
York Timesthis spring that Twitter’s role
in Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency was “a very bad thing”,
adding: “If it’s true that he wouldn’t be president if it weren’t
for Twitter, then yeah, I’m sorry.”

But tech’s new cohort
of critics are not exactly profiles in courage, according to Siva
Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of
Virginia who is writing a book about Facebook.

“Social media
scholars have been warning about the fact that Facebook has been
hijacked by hateful groups, violent groups, authoritarian leaders
for years. It’s just that very few people have been paying
attention. It doesn’t take a huge intellectual leap to be a
Facebook critic these days.”

Indeed, it took
nearly a year for Mark Zuckerberg toapologizefor
dismissing concerns that Facebook’s amplification of
misinformation could have influenced the presidential election as
a “pretty crazy idea”.

Garcia-Martinez also
cast doubt upon the sincerity of some of these mea culpas. “He
hasn’t exactly given back his Facebook equity or the wealth that
derived from it,” he said of Palihapitiya. “I think [Palihapitiya
and Parker] might have minor pricklings of conscience, but are
they really changed men who are seeking to redress their sins of
the past? Fuck no.”

Many of the men who
have become tech naysayers have changed in one crucial aspect,
however: they have become fathers.

“A lot of the
designers and coders who were in their 20s when we were creating
these things didn’t have kids. Now they have kids,” Fadell said in
June. “And they see what’s going on, and they say: ‘Wait a
second.’”

Palihapitiya told
CNBC that his own children were allowed “no screen time
whatsoever”, while Parker, a father of two, said of social
networking: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s
brains.”

That Silicon Valley
parents use the money they earn from tech to send their children
totech-free
schoolsis no secret. But such qualms have
not stopped the tech companies themselves from continuing to push
their products on to other people’s children, both through
partnerships withschool
districtsand specialapps
for childrenas young as six.

Roger McNamee, an
early investor in Google and Facebook and a stalwart of the new
tech critics, lambasted the targeting of children in an article
for the Guardian this year, writing: “Alphabet provides
Chromebooks to elementary schools with the objective of capturing
the attention, and perhaps even behavioral data, about children.
At the same time, Alphabet’s YouTube Kids is a site filled with
inappropriate content that creates addiction in children far too
young to resist.”

Vaidhyanathan warned
that even that conversation suffers from “the myopia of western
Europe and America”.

“When we look around
for the places where Facebook has been used and abused in the most
damaging ways, we have to look at the Philippines, India, and
Myanmar – places where whole radical nationalist movements have
been fostered and executed on Facebook,” said Vaidhyanathan.

If that nightmare is
keeping anyone inSilicon
Valleyup at night, we haven’t heard about
it yet. But it’s as good as certain that if one techie decides to
take the leap and speak out, others will follow.

HUTTING DOWN GOOGLE’S COUP D’ETAT TAKE-OVER OF THE
U.S. GOVERNMENT

By Audrey Constance

In The
Intercept’s notorious article about how Google bought
the Obama White House and planted all of Google’s staff in the
Department of Energy, Patent Office and The White House itself,
shockers were revealed. Take a look at the original article at
this link:

In a number of
other investigative articles, by many credible sources, it was
revealed that Google had taken over part of the operations of the
U.S. Government in order to steer government cash and policy
decisions to Google.

Many researchers
are now hunting down those Google-shills in California State and
U.S. Federal offices and reporting them for interdiction.

Researchers,
reporters, citizen journalists and others are using Linkedin,
Facebook, the Office of Personnel Management, and other records to
track them and report them to Trump’s strategy guy: Bannon, and
the Transition team of the President-Elect.

The Google plants,
shills and ex-employees Coup D'Etat contractors and staff that
Google planted in the U.S. Government are almost now completed
identified. Looks like every single one is getting fired.

We heard that
Google won't even be able to operate as a company within 38
months. Apparently corruption does NOT pay!

“If you know a
Google, Report A Google”

Washington, DC insiders are being asked to send lists of Google
front people, that got themselves embedded in government offices
in order to manipulate cash to Google, to report them to the Trump
Transition office in New York City.